In 2021, 13 Michigan citizens will decide what the state's House, Senate and Congressional districts will look like for the 2022 elections and beyond.

Starting this fall, eligible residents will be able to put their hat in the ring to be on the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission when applications are made available on the Secretary of State's website.

The commission will ultimately be made up of four Democrats, four Republicans and five unaffiliated independents.

But the competition could be stiff - under the new constitutional language adopted when voters approved Proposal 2 in 2018, the Secretary of State is required to mail applications to a minimum of 10,000 randomly selected Michigan voters.

Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson says her office will be encouraging people across the state to apply until the June 1, 2020 deadline for applicants, and said having several hundred thousand applicants isn’t out of the realm of possibility.

So what will it mean to be a redistricting commissioner in Michigan? Here's what we know.

What are the commission's duties?

Jake May | MLive.com

What are the commission's duties?

Once seated, the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission will be responsible for drawing political district maps for the legislature and Congress, a task previously handled by the Michigan legislature.

From fall 2020 through fall 2021, the commission will work on redrawing maps based on results from the 2020 census, and are required to follow a series of criteria, including:

Complying with federal requirements, including making each district an equal population size

Making the districts geographically contiguous

Keeping communities of interest together

Not favoring any political party or candidate for office

Considering county, city and township lines

Making the districts reasonably compact

The commission is required to host at least 15 public hearings throughout the drafting process, and needs to adopt the maps by Nov. 1, 2021.

Once the final applications go live, the commission is open to registered Michigan voters - with several caveats.

Voters Not Politicians - the group behind Proposal 2 - wanted to remove politics from the political redistricting process, and included several restrictions for who would be eligible to serve.

A Michigan voter would be ineligible to serve if one of these criteria applied to them in the last six years:

They were a candidate for a partisan office, or an elected official holding partisan office

They worked as a registered lobbyist, or as an employee of one

They worked as a consultant or employee of a partisan official or candidate, or for a political action committee

They were an officer for a political party

They were employed by the legislature or were an unclassified state employee

They are immediate family members of anyone who is ineligible based on the above criteria

Are precinct delegates or nonpartisan officeholders eligible?

Some of those restrictions are open to interpretation - including what qualifies as a "partisan office."

Currently, the draft guidelines issued by the Secretary of State indicate someone who's served as a precinct delegate for either the Democrat or Republican Party in the last six years may not be able to serve, as it's technically a partisan local office.

Benson recently told reporters in the department's read of the law and in conversations with nearly everyone they've spoken to about the subject, the "near-universal" interpretation is that recent precinct delegates were meant to be included under the ineligibility requirements.

"We think it's fairly clear under the language of the Constitutional amendment that they're not eligible and that's our determination," she said. "We welcome others to make the case otherwise."

Under the draft guidelines, the Secretary of State noted candidates for nonpartisan offices - including school boards, nonpartisan local office holders and elected judges - may be eligible to serve on the commission.